CipSoft
CipSoft GmbH is the company that developed and produced the game Tibia,TibiaME and Fiction Fighters. Based in Regensburg, Germany, they began in 1995 as a group of university students who had the notion to write an online role playing game. The company was formally founded in June 2001 by Stephan Börzsönyi, Guido Lübke, Ulrich Schlott, and Stephan Vogler, when the students decided to run Tibia full-time after graduating from the university. The founders act as executive officers of the company. They still maintain Tibia today (with the assistance of paid and volunteer staff), and regularly release content updates, game patches, and feature modifications. Origin of the name Initially, the creators of Tibia named their team "CIP Productions." When the company was founded, the name was changed to CipSoft. According to the Markus Hof, the word CIP comes from the german acronym of "C'''omputer '''I'nvestitions 'P'rojekt''". This is a project where universities invest in rooms with computers for their students, and the Tibia project was born in one of these rooms. The CipSoft team http://www.cipsoft.com/ As at November 2006, the team consisted of 4 executive officers plus 23 full-time employees who work in 6 different departments: * '''Programmers: development of the client, the server software, the website, and tools for the development and management of the games * Content team: creation of game content (e.g. graphics, quests, game mechanics, story, NPCs' text, design of areas, etc.) * System administrators: looking after the game servers in the computer centres and responsibility for the maintenance of the office's infrastructure * Customer support: supporting the players via email, website boards and also in-game * Marketing: identifying the wishes of the players for game features, managing the public relations of the company, advertising and distribution * Organization: doing all the administrative tasks, and checking if everything is going fine You can find more information about the staff members in various Interviews with them. Products CipSoft's official site says that its "vision is to develop and to publish innovative products that are based on new technologies", and that they "do not necessarily confine ourselves to computer games, but the focus of our expertise is clearly on the fields of IT, software development, Internet, entertainment, computer games and community management" http://www.cipsoft.com/about/index.php?language=en&subsection=about1. Its first product was the game Tibia, which was one of the first graphical online role-playing games; it was initially developed as a hobby, and later it became a commercial game. The second product was Tibia Micro Edition (TibiaME), the very first MMORPG for mobile phones. CipSoft is currently working on the development of a third game (that has nothing to do with Tibia), for which they hired a 3-d artist. The game is named "Fiction Fighters". The game is described at official website as: Fiction Fighters® is an interactive comic in which players enter a parallel comic universe. The players act and interact exclusively in 3D comic strips. Fiction Fighters is a browser-based multiplayer game. In various game modes, characters can solve exciting quests, fight against each other, explore the background story, meet with other players or even develop their own stories and comic strips. Comic strips are the central element in Fiction Fighters. Players act and interact exclusively in comic strips. Fiction Fighters is a browser-based multiplayer game where all comic panels will be rendered server-side in 3D. Official website External Links CipSoft GmbH official website